Jeremiah : Being The Baird Lecture for 1922 Part 23

The writers of the Old Testament give full expression to the idea of predestination, but what they understand by it is not what much of Jewish and Christian theology has understood. In the Old Testament predestination is not to character or fate, to salvation or its opposite, to eternal life or eternal punishment, but to service, or some particular form of service, for G.o.d and man. The Great Evangelist of the Exile so defines it for Israel as a whole: Israel an eternal purpose of G.o.d for the enlightenment and blessing of mankind. And this faith is enforced on the nation, not for their pride nor to foster the confidence that G.o.d will never break from them, but to rouse their conscience, and give them courage when they are feeble or indolent or hopeless of their service. So with Jeremiah in regard both to his own predestination and that of his people. In his Parable of the Potter (as we have seen) it is for service as vessels that the clay is moulded; G.o.d is revealed not as predestining character or quality, but as shaping characters for ends for which under His hand they yield suitable qualities. The parable ill.u.s.trates not arbitrariness of election nor irresistible sovereignty but a double freedom-freedom in G.o.d to change His decrees for moral reasons, freedom on man's part to thwart G.o.d's designs for him. In further ill.u.s.tration of this remember again the wonderful words, _Be thou not dismayed before them, lest I make thee dismayed; if thou wilt turn, then shall I turn thee_. To work upon man G.o.d needs man's own will.

From imagining the Deity as sheer absolute will, to which the experience of the resistless force behind his own soul must sometimes have tempted him, Jeremiah was further guarded by his visions of the Divine working in Nature. He is never more clear or musical than when singing of the regularity, faithfulness and reasonableness of this. With such a Creator, such a Providence, there could be neither arbitrariness nor caprice.

Having this experience of G.o.d's ways with man it was not possible for Jeremiah to succ.u.mb to those influences of a strong unqualified faith in predestination which have often overwhelmed the personalities of its devotees. Someone has talked of "the wine of predestination," and history both in the East and in the West furnishes cases of men so drugged by it as to lose their powers of will, reason and heart, and become either apathetic unquestioning slaves of fate, or violent and equally unquestioning dogmatists and tyrants-the soul-less instruments of a pitiless force. G.o.d overpowers them: He is all and they are nothing. It was far otherwise with Jeremiah, who realised and preserved his individuality not only as against the rest of his people but as against G.o.d Himself. His earlier career appears from the glimpses we get of it to have been, if not a constant, yet a frequent struggle with the Deity. He argues against the Divine calls to him. And even when he yields he expresses his submission in terms which almost proudly define his own will as over against that of G.o.d:

Lord thou beguiledst me, and I let myself be beguiled, Thou wast stronger than I and hast conquered.

The man would not be mastered, but if mastered is not crushed. He questions each moment of his own sufferings, each moment of his people's oncoming doom. He debates with G.o.d on matters of justice. He wrestles things out with G.o.d and emerges from each wrestle not halt and limping like Jacob of old, but firm and calm, more clear in his mind and more sure of himself-as we see him at last when the full will of G.o.d breaks upon his soul with the Battle of Carchemish and he calmly surrenders to his own and his people's fate. That is how this prophet, by nature so fluid, and so shrinking stands out henceforth _a fenced city and a wall of bronze over against the whole people of the land_: the one unbreakable figure in the breaking-up of the state and the nation. We perceive the method in G.o.d's discipline of such a soul. He sees his servant's weakness and grants him the needful athletic for it, by wrestling with him Himself.

We may here take in full the remarkable pa.s.sage, part of which we have already studied.(736)

Too Righteous art Thou, O Lord, XII. 1 That with Thee I should argue.

Yet cases there are I must speak with Thee of:- The way of the wicked-why doth it prosper, And the treacherous all be at ease?

Thou did'st plant them, yea they take root, 2 They get on, yea they make fruit; Near in their mouths art Thou, But far from their reins.

But me, O Lord, Thou hast known,(737) 3 And tested my heart with Thee; Drag them out like sheep for the shambles, To the day of slaughter devote them.

Thou hast run with the foot and they wore thee- 5 How wilt thou vie with the horse?

If in peaceful country thou can'st not trust, How wilt thou do in the rankness of Jordan?

For even thy brothers, the house of thy father, 6 Even they have betrayed thee.

Even they have called after thee loudly, Trust them not, though they speak thee fair.(738)

_The rankness_ or _luxuriance of Jordan_ is the jungle on both sides of the river, in which the lions lie. This then is all the answer that the wearied and perplexed servant gets from his Lord. The troubles of which he complains are but the training for still sorer. The only meaning of the checks and sorrows of life is to brace us for worse. It is the strain that ever brings the strength. Life is explained as a graded and progressively strenuous discipline, the result of it a stronger and more finely tempered soul. But this surely suggests the questions: Is that the whole result? Is the soul thus to be trained, braced and refined, only at last to be broken and vanish? These are natural questions to the Lord's answer, but Jeremiah does not put them. Unlike Job he makes no start, even with this stimulus, to break through to another life.

3. Sacrifice.

But in thus achieving his individuality over against both his nation and his G.o.d, Jeremiah accomplished only half of the work he did for Israel and mankind. It is proof of how great a prophet we have in him that he who was the first in Israel to realise the independence of the single self in religion should also become the supreme example under the Old Covenant of the sacrifice of that self for others, that he should break from one type of religious solidarity only to ill.u.s.trate another and a n.o.bler, that the prophet of individuality should be also the symbol if not the conscious preacher of vicariousness. This further stage in Jeremiah's experience is of equally dramatic interest, though we cannot always trace the order of his utterances which bear witness to it.

There must often have come to him the temptation to break loose from a people who deserved nothing of him, but cruelly entreated him, and who themselves were so manifestly doomed. Once at least he confesses this.

O that I had in the wilderness IX. 2 A wayfarers' lodge!

Then would I leave my people, And get away from them; For adulterers all of them be, A bundle of traitors.

They stretch their tongues 3 Like a falsing bow, And never for truth Use their power in the land.

But from evil to evil go forth And Me they know not!(739)

Well might the Prophet wish to escape from such a people-worn out with their falsehood, their impurity, and their senseless optimism. Yet it is not solitude for which he prays but some inn or caravanserai where he would have been less lonely than in his unshared house in Jerusalem, _sitting alone because of the wrath of the Lord_. His desire is to be set where a man may see all the interest of pa.s.sing life without any responsibility for it, where men are wayfarers only and come and go like a river on whose bank you lie, and help you to muse and perhaps to sing but never touch the heart or the conscience of you. It is the prayer of a poet sick of being a prophet and a tester. Jeremiah was weary of having to look below the surface of life, to know people long enough to judge them with a keener conscience than their own and to love them with a hopeless and breaking heart that never got an answer to its love or to its calls for repentance-wearied with watching habit slowly grow from ill to ill, old truths become lies or at the best mere formalities, prophets who only flattered, priests to bless them, and the people loving to have it so.(740) O to have no other task in life than to watch the street from the balcony!

But our prayers often outrun themselves in the utterance and Jeremiah's too carried with it its denial. _My people-that I might leave my people_-this, it is clear from all that we have heard from him, his heart would never suffer him to do. And so gradually we find him turning with deeper devotion to the forlorn hope of his ministry, his fate to feel his judgment of his people grow ever more despairing, but his love for them deeper and more yearning.

From the year of Carchemish onward he appears not again to have tried or prayed to escape. Through the rest of the reign of Jehoiakim they persecuted him to the edge of death. Prophets and priests called for his execution. He was stoned, beaten and thrust into the stocks. The king scornfully cut up the roll of his prophecies; and the people following their formalist leaders rejected his word. With the first captivity under Jehoiakim all the better cla.s.ses left Jerusalem, but he elected to remain with the refuse. When in the reign of ?edekiah the Chaldeans came down on the city and Jeremiah counselled its surrender he was again beaten and was flung into a pit to starve to death. When he was freed and the besiegers gave him the opportunity, he would not go over to them. Even when the city had fallen and her captors hearing of his counsel offered him security and a position in Babylonia, he chose instead to share the fortunes of the little remnant left in their ruined land. When they broke up it was the worst of them who took possession of his person and disregarding his appeals hurried him down to Egypt. There, on alien soil and among countrymen who had given themselves to an alien religion, the one great personality of his time, who had served the highest interests of his nation for forty years, reluctant but unfaltering, and whose scorned words, every one, had been vindicated by events, is with the dregs of his people swept from our sight. _He had given his back to the smiters and his cheeks to them who plucked out the hair; he had not hidden his face from the shame and the spitting. He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. He was taken from prison and from judgment and cut off from the land of the living; and they made his grave with the wicked, though he had done no violence neither was deceit in his mouth._ It is the second greatest sacrifice that Israel has offered for mankind.

If Jeremiah thus of his own will suffered _with_ his people, and to the bitter end with the worst of them, was he also conscious of suffering _for_ them? After his death, when the full tragedy of his life came home to his people's heart, the sense of the few suffering for the many, the righteous for the sinners, began to be articulate in Israel-remarkably enough, let us remember, in the very period when owing to the break-up of the nation the single soul came to its own and belief in the responsibility of every man for his own sins also emerged and prevailed.

Of the influence of the example of Jeremiah's spiritual loneliness, combined with his devotion to his sinful people, in developing these doctrines of individualism and self-sacrifice for others there can be no doubt. The stamp of his sufferings is on every pa.s.sage in that exilic work "Isaiah" XL-LXVI, which presents the Suffering Servant of the Lord and declares the atoning virtues of His Agonies and Death.

But it is not clear that Jeremiah ever felt anything of this about himself; if he did so he has refrained from uttering it. Yet he must have been very near so high a consciousness. His love and his pity for his sinful people were full. He can hardly have failed to descry that his own spiritual agonies which brought him into so close a personal communion with G.o.d would show to every other man the way for his approach also to the Most High and Holy and his reconciliation with his G.o.d. Again he was weighed down with his people's sins; he bore on his heart the full burden of them. He confessed them. The shame which the people did not feel for them, he felt; and he painted the curse upon them in words which prove how deeply the iron had entered his own soul. He had a profound sense of the engrained quality of evil,(741) the deep saturation of sin, the enormity of the guilt of those who sinned against the light and love of G.o.d.(742) A fallacy of his day was that G.o.d could easily and would readily forgive sin, that the standard ritual might at once atone for it and comfortable preaching bring the a.s.surance of its removal. He denied this, and affirmed that such things do not change character; that no wash of words can cleanse from sin, no sacraments, however ancient, can absolve from guilt.(743) That way only strict and painful repentance can work; repentance following the deep searching of the heart by the Word and the Judgments of G.o.d and the agony of learning and doing His Will.(744) To its last dregs he drank the cup of the Lord's wrath upon His false and wilful nation; he suffered with them every pang of the slow death their sins had brought upon them. And yet he was most conscious of his own innocence when most certain of his fate. The more he loyally gave himself to his mission the more he suffered and the nearer was he brought to death. The tragedy perplexed him,

Why is my pain perpetual, My wound past healing?(745)

The only reply he heard from heaven was the order to stand fast, for G.o.d was with him to deliver-but that more troubles awaited him. And beyond this what is there to answer the staggering Prophet save that if a man have the Divine gifts of a keener conscience and a more loving heart than his fellows, there inevitably comes with such gifts the obligation of suffering for them. Every degree in which love stands above her brethren means pain and shame to love though as yet she bear no thorn or nail in her flesh. This spiritual distress Jeremiah felt for the people long before he shared with them the physical penalties of their sins. Just there-in his keener conscience, in his hot shame for sins not his as if they were his, in his agony for his people's estrangement from G.o.d and in his own constantly wounded love-lay his real subst.i.tution, his vicarious offering for his people.

Did Jeremiah ever conceive the far-off fulness of the travail thus laid upon his soul, the truth that this vicarious agony of a righteous man for the sins of others is borne by G.o.d Himself? To that question we have only fragments of an answer. In his discourses, both earlier and later, when he talks directly in the Name of the Deity-when the Deity speaks in the first person-the words breathe as much effort and pa.s.sion as when Jeremiah speaks in his own person. The Prophet is very sure that his G.o.d is Love, and he hears that love utter itself in tones of yearning for the love of men, and even of agony for their sin and misery. There is, too, a singular prayer of his which is tense with the instinct, that G.o.d would surely be to Israel what Jeremiah had resolved and striven to be-not a far-off G.o.d who occasionally visited or pa.s.sed through His people, but One in their midst sharing their pain; not indifferent, as he fears in another place,(746) to the shame that is upon them, but bearing even this. The prayer which I mean is the one in XIV. 8, 9, which recalls not only the terms but the essence of Jeremiah's longing to escape from his people, and lodge afar with wayfaring men, aloof and irresponsible.

O Hope of Israel, His Saviour In time of trouble.

Why be like a pa.s.senger through the land, Or the wayfaring guest of a night?

Yet Lord Thou art in our midst, Do not forsake us.(747)

I may be going too far in interpreting the longing and faith that lie behind these words. But they come out very fully in later prophets who explicitly a.s.sert that the Divine Nature does dwell with men, shares their ethical warfare and bears the shame of their sins. And the truth of it all was manifested past doubt in the Incarnation, the Pa.s.sion and the Cross of the Son of G.o.d.

But whether Jeremiah had instinct of it, as I have ventured to think from his prayer, or had not, he foreshadowed, as far as mere man can, the sufferings of Jesus Christ for men-and this is his greatest glory as a prophet.

Lecture VIII.

G.o.d, MAN AND THE NEW COVENANT.

We have followed the career of Jeremiah from his call onwards to the end, and we have traced his religious experience with its doubts, struggles, crises, and settlement at last upon the things that are sure: his debates with G.o.d and strifes with men, which while they roused him to outbursts of pa.s.sion also braced his will, and stilled the wilder storms of his heart.

There remains the duty of gathering the results of this broken and gusty, yet growing and fruitful experience: the truths which came forth of its travail, about G.o.d and Man and their relations. And in particular we have still to study the ideal form which Jeremiah, or (as some questionably argue) one of his disciples, gave to these relations: the New Covenant, new in contrast to G.o.d's ancient Covenant with Israel as recorded and enforced in the Book of Deuteronomy.

1. G.o.d.

Among the surprises which Jeremiah's own Oracles have for the student is the discovery of how little they dwell upon the transcendent and infinite aspects of the Divine Nature. On these Jeremiah adds almost nothing to what his predecessors or contemporaries revealed. Return to his original visions and contrast them with those, for example, of Isaiah and Ezekiel.

Isaiah's vision was of the Lord upon a Throne, high and lifted up, surrounded by Seraphim crying to one another, _Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of Hosts! the whole earth is full of His Glory!_ And their voices rocked the Temple and filled it with smoke. Here are a Presence, Awful Majesty, Infinite Holiness and Glory, blinding the seer and crus.h.i.+ng his heart contrite. Or take the inaugural vision of Ezekiel-the storm-wind out of the North, the vast cloud, the fire infolding itself, the brightness round about and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber; the rush and whirl of life that followed, wheels and wings and rings full of eyes; and over this the likeness of a firmament of the colour of the terrible ice and the sound of wings like the noise of many waters, as the Voice of the Almighty and above the firmament a Throne and on the Throne the Appearance of a Man, the Appearance of the likeness of the Glory of the Lord. _And I, when I saw it, fell upon my face._

In the inaugural visions of Jeremiah there is none of this Awfulness-only _What art thou seeing Jeremiah? the branch of an almond tree ... a caldron boiling._ That was characteristic of his encounters and intercourse with the Deity throughout. They were constant and close, but in them all we are aware only of a Voice and an Argument. There is no Throne, no Appearance, no Majesty, no overwhelming sense of Holiness and Glory, no rush of wings nor floods of colour or of song.(748) Jeremiah takes for granted what other prophets have said of G.o.d. But the Deity whose Power and Glory they revealed is his Familiar. The Lord talks with Jeremiah as a man with his fellow.

For this there were several reasons, and first the particular quality of the Prophet's imagination. His native powers of vision were not such as soar, or at any rate easily soar, to the sublime. He was a lyric poet and his revelations of G.o.d are subjective and given to us by glimpses in scattered verses, which, however intimate and exquisite, have not the adoring wonder of his prophetic peers.